Today two people have appeared in court charged with sending abusive and menacing tweets to the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. They have both pleaded guilty.

Last July,Criado-Perez made headlines, after she became the focus of a huge outpouring of abuse on Twitter. She received some 50 rape and murder threats every hour for two days. Her trolling was that bad it started trending.

Caroline Criado-Perez: the abuse was so extreme she has reported it to police Photo: PA

She had originally come to prominence having successfully campaigned to keep a woman on British banknotes and this mini victory has irked some in the digital ether.

At the time there was much debate about the extra measures Twitter et al could put in place to stop such tirades happening again. However, as my colleague Marta Cooper,wrote eloquently at the time, there is no technological fix to end hate speech online. It’s a deeply rooted societal ill which needs greater tackling offline – not a one-day Twitter boycott (that was attempted by a few high profile tweeps shortly after Criado-Perez’s misery or a ‘report abuse’ button.

There was also the assumption that the people trolling Criado-Perez and latterly, Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow, who vociferously supported her feminist comrade, were all men.

Dear reader, that’s where you would be wrong. After the hundreds of abusive tweets, just two people have been charged (a problem which warrants a whole other discussion as the Crown Prosecution Service by all accounts are struggling to stay on top of this hate crime) and one of them is, wait for it, a woman.

Both Isabella Sorley, 23 and John Nimmo, have been charged with improper use of a communications network under Section 127 of the Communications Act.

And today at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, they have both entered guilty pleas. And I am sure the first place Sorley will announce her fate will ironically be on Twitter. She has already tweeted this morning a Twitpic of her outside Buckingham Palace en route to court.

And herein is the problem. People like Isabella Sorley attach no meaning to any of the words or information they share publicly online. They are suffering from a modern day condition: major digital overshare.

Moreover, they don’t think words written on the internet are capable of being proper abuse. You know like a physical punch?

The internet has effectively made them disconnect their sense of morality from their actions. For a whole generation, of which I am very much a part, we don’t believe that our actions online matter. We think it’s fiction. Slowly it’s changing. But typing something you wouldn’t say out loud to someone under your name on the internet is real. As both Sorely and Nimmo are finding out this morning.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest – are all very real, very measurable and very permanent records of ourselves and our conduct.

The internet was created to set information free – just as Twitter was. It wasn’t set up to play host to huge amounts of trolling and hate exchanges that largely go unpoliced and create all types of untold damage.

But an uncomfortable truth in all of this is that one of Criado-Perez’s tormenters was a woman, the same specie that she tries, as a women’s rights campaigner to represent.

Mary Beard

Yes, the majority of trolls are men. No doubt about it. The academic Mary Beard has exposed many of her digital tormentors and they are mostly male. The majority of the 10-15 people I block online each for rude or unseemly remarks are men. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I blocked a woman.

I also had the displeasure last year of actually interviewing two male trolls on my radio show. One of them, Gary, deep-voiced menacing-sounding man, sat in an eerily quiet home, told me in no uncertain terms that “feminists like Caroline [Criado-Perez] were undermining what it is to be a man” and needed “sorting out”.

“Men are predators,” he explained calmly. “And this [rape threats] is what we do.” I was almost stunned into silence – which is after all what blokes like Gary get off on.

Regrouping, I then asked him how he would feel if, like Criado-Perez, his mother (you hope the one woman he may respect for creating him, so he could you know, fulfil his male predatory purpose on earth and all that) received 50 rape threats an hour?

His first answer was genius: “She wouldn’t because my mum’s not a feminist.” Right.

I asked the question again and his reply defied belief: “She would know these men wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.”

No Gary, rape ain’t a metaphor mate. Metaphor for what exactly, I asked.

Gary, I think a little trolled out by himself, couldn’t even answer that one and I duly decided airtime needed to go back to the majority of mankind, who deplore this kind of mentality.

But there are women behaving like this too and we ignore equally deploring them at our peril.

Meanwhile Isabella Sorely publicly tweeted to her 75 followers three weeks ago her true feelings (again amazing that she would do this ahead of her sentencing) about her abusive tweets to Criado-Perez.

Here are a sample of her thoughts freely available online:

“Hard skin is something you have to develop in Britain. People will look for any kind of weakness, and use it against you.”

“No one should fear something that isn't a real threat. Letters/words are never a threat. They're hardly going to jump off the page at you.

“Bit pathetic really that you've wasted all of the time/money because you were scared by a couple of words. #growsomeballs”

And the most telling one:

“You're in the public eye, you're on Twitter then you should expect some sort of abuse. People take it all the time, why are you different?!”

Yet Sorely is probably smart enough to know she would be charged if she started threatening someone in the street with murder or a rape threat. The internet is just a different type of street – except we can all see it – wherever we are.

While the majority of these trolls, regardless of gender, are just attention-seeking losers probably holed up in their bedroom feeling annoyed at the world, they are part of our society and we cannot let people think this type of behaviour is acceptable – online or off. It’s too easy to just tell people to come off Twitter other social networks if they “can’t stand the heat”. They won’t – as they are a big and most enjoyable part of many people’s lives.

And we certainly mustn’t assume that all of the perpetrators are men. Some of them are women, abusing other women with a digitally loaded gun that they don’t how to control. No amount of Silicon Valley innovation will change that. Only we can.